Turkey in the late 1960s was a country of sharp political tension. A military coup in 1960 had reshuffled power without resolving the underlying conflicts between left and right, between secular nationalism and religion, between organized labor and government authority. Anti-American sentiment had grown steadily, particularly among students and trade unions, as Turkey's close alignment with the United States came to be seen by many on the left as a form of subordination.

When the US Sixth Fleet anchored in the Bosphorus, it struck many Turks as a provocation. Seventy-six youth organizations, supported by labor unions and the Workers' Party of Turkey, organized a march they called the 'Mustafa Kemal March Against Imperialism.' On the morning of 16 February, tens of thousands — some estimates suggest 30,000 or more — gathered at Beyazıt Square. The route would take them through Karaköy, Tophane, and Gümüşsuyu, passing by the Istanbul Technical University to pay tribute at the place where a student, Vedat Demircioğlu, had recently died. The march was political, but its character was nonviolent.

While the demonstrators assembled and marched, a counter-mobilization was underway. Right-wing student groups gathered at the Dolmabahçe Mosque, where they prayed before moving to intercept the march. They came armed with sticks, stones, and knives.

Police were present but maintained only a thin cordon — reportedly just two rows of officers — as the right-wing groups approached. That thin line was easily broken. When the attackers reached the marchers near Taksim Square, violence erupted: batons swung, blades came out, and Molotov cocktails were thrown. The confrontation turned the surrounding streets into a scene of chaos and injury.

Ali Turgut Aytaç and Duran Erdoğan were stabbed to death. More than 200 other people were injured. The historian Feroz Ahmad, a leading scholar of modern Turkey, later described Bloody Sunday as 'an example of organized, fascist violence,' a phrase that pointed directly at the political character of the assault — this was not a spontaneous brawl but a planned attack on a legal demonstration.

Bloody Sunday 1969 did not occur in isolation. It was one of the more visible episodes in a decade of escalating confrontation between Turkey's organized left and organized right, a conflict that would grow bloodier still in the 1970s. Similar attacks on labor groups and leftist demonstrations occurred in 1971 and again, catastrophically, in 1977 — the Taksim Square massacre of 1 May 1977, in which at least 34 people died in circumstances that remain officially unresolved, is sometimes called Turkey's 'second Bloody Sunday.'

The political violence of this era reflected genuine and deep divisions in Turkish society over the country's direction — its relationship with the United States, the role of Islam in public life, the rights of workers and unions. Those divisions were real. What Bloody Sunday illustrates is that organized political violence, whoever carries it out, falls on real people who had come to exercise a right to assemble.

The Turkish term Kanlı Pazar — Bloody Sunday — is not merely a label for an event. It became part of the political vocabulary of the Turkish left, a shorthand for the violence that movements for workers' rights and anti-imperialism faced in the streets. The name was already being used when, eight years later, a second massacre occurred on a different May Day at the same Taksim Square that had framed the 1969 events.

Ali Turgut Aytaç and Duran Erdoğan are remembered at annual commemorations organized by labor and leftist groups in Turkey. Their deaths happened in a crowd, in a city, on an ordinary winter afternoon that became anything but ordinary. They were demonstrators exercising a political right in a polarized city, and they were killed for it. The full accountability for that killing — who organized the attack, whether any state actors were complicit — was never fully established in court.